On Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:15:12 -0800 (PST), Frogwatch
wrote:

Bosun's chair: Not bad but does require that somebody else has your
life in their hands which I do not like.

On my old sailboats we always made it standard practice to have a
second halyard attached to the bosuns chair, which was tailed to a
winch by a second person. In all of the many trips up the mast, the
second halyard never came into play but it was reassuring to know it
was there.